What is the 40-30-30 rule? Simply put, it’s an argument that when you prepare for anything in life, only 40% of the preparation is physical – the rest is mental. Thirty percent of preparation is technical skill and experience, and the second thirty percent is the willingness to take risks.

This “rule” comes up again and again in all different areas of life. Here are several examples from my own life where I’ve seen it.

When I’m playing a game I’ve played a lot of times before, I have an intuition as to what move to make next, built from years and years of experience (the 30% that comes from technical skill and experience). However, I also find that it’s very easy to just keep using the same strategy over and over again because I’ve somehow come to the conclusion that it’s the best one. So, if I combine that technical skill and experience with a risky new strategy I’ve devised (the other 30%), I might lose – but I might also devise a way of playing that’s even better.

With investing, I have a good understanding of my own risk tolerance, an understanding built up over a long period of time (the 30% that comes from experience). Howver, I also know that if I don’t push against my risk tolerance a bit and look at new investment opportunities from time to time (the other 30%, risk), I’ll likely miss out on great opportunities.

I also see it in my career, both now and when I worked for a large organization. I would often have a well-worn daily routine that worked and got the things done that I needed to get done (the 30% that comes from experience), but if I really want to excel, I sometimes have to step outside the box a little (the risk-based 30%).

The 40/30/30 rule really does provide a great framework for success, no matter what you do.

Do something worthwhile (the first 40%) means that you’re willing to get up off the couch and do something. Maybe it’s getting ahead in a career. Maybe it’s getting into a new hobby. Maybe it’s simply getting a grip on your investments. 40% of the journey is simply trying.

Keep at it (the next 30%) is simply encouragement to not let a new initiative slide, because the more you work at it, the easier it becomes. Even more important, the more you work at it, the more the basic skills that make up the task begin to become natural to you.

Take risks (the final 30%) simply means to not do things the same way every single time. When you’ve become skilled at something, it’s easy to become wedded to the same routine. Never stop looking at what you do and trying out alternate paths. Not only does this grow your skills (making your basic routine even better), it also helps you to uncover new ways of doing things.

Great… so how do you do this? How can you apply the 40/30/30 rule in your life? The best first step is to figure out the area of your life where you want to improve. Do you want to get out of debt? Do you want to improve your skill at a musical instrument? Do you want to get a promotion at work? Do you want to become a writer?

Once you’ve figured out what you want to do, research it a bit. Figure out what things you’ll need to do to accomplish that goal.

After that, start practicing and building skills. The best way to do that is to start doing the thing you want to master every single day. For me, a thirty day project works well for this. I just commit to doing a certain thing every single day for thirty days (if that’s possible). At the end of it, I’ve usually vastly improved at whatever skill or attribute I was trying to develop.

Quite often, thirty days is enough to establish a positive new routine in your life, so keep it up. Keep doing that thing every day until it becomes truly normal and seemingly effortless.

Then, take a risk. Change what you’re doing a bit. Make it more difficult, or at least different. Explore something new. If you’re taking a walk every day, increase your walking pace a bit and use a stopwatch to slowly trim your time around the block. If you’re trying to break through at work, volunteer for a task that you might have avoided before, like giving a presentation. If you’re playing a game, try a completely different strategy and see how it works. If you’re investing, dig into some new investments that you haven’t looked at before and consider putting some money into them after you’ve studied them.

What you’ll find is that your already-built skill will help carry you through this new challenge and that the rewards of this new risk are great. You end up in better shape, with a better career, with a better gaming experience, and with better investments – or with improvement in anything you’d like to take on in life.

Three Examples
In order to illustrate this, I thought I’d use three real examples from my own life recently, as I’ve been using “the five whys” more and more lately to uncover the roots of some of the problems in my life.

Example 1: Crunching the Numbers
I usually calculate my net worth in a spreadsheet because I like the layout and the reports, but I don’t update it as often as I might like.

Why? It takes quite a lot of time to dig out all of those numbers.

Why? They’re stored in a lot of different databases and on a lot of different websites, which I have to visit individually to extract the numbers.

As a result, I’ve decided to give Quicken a shot again. In the past, I used Microsoft Money for about a year until I found that I didn’t like the reports it generated – I preferred what I had in my own spreadsheet. Quicken may be able to provide better reports (it looks like it will from the reviews I’ve read) and, even if it doesn’t, it’ll make it easier to retrieve the numbers I want to see. (And, yes, I’ll be posting a review of it in the near future.)

Example 2: Broken Exercise Routine
During the final push to complete my book, I abandoned my regular daily exercise routine because I needed absolutely every spare minute. Since I finished it, I’ve been having difficulty getting back into that exercise routine.

Why? Every morning, I feel fairly pressured to write content for The Simple Dollar instead of exercising.

Why? I have (post-book) writer’s block and my usual protection against it (unpublished posts that I have in reserve) isn’t there any more, because I used many of those in the final push to finish the book and the few days afterward when I simply needed to do something besides write.

Why? I’m lacking the “idea juice” I usually have and without it, my entire daily routine is disrupted.

So, my solution is to find ways to reinvigorate my creativity. Over the last few days, I’ve been spending time on brainstorming exercises, simple writing exercises, and so on, as well as just reading a lot – all of that while avoiding the keyboard. It’s really starting to help. Then, as I get back in the flow, I’ll be able to build up a backlog of articles again, enabling me to feel free to exercise in the mornings.

Example 3: Laundry Backup
We often wind up with a large backup of laundry, then find ourselves doing several loads on a single weekend day.

Why? Our laundry routine doesn’t work.

Why? One big problem is that our laundry room is literally as far as possible in our home from our bedrooms, plus the laundry room is back in the corner near the guest bedroom. Out of sight, out of mind. As a result, we often don’t even think about the laundry until the evening, when we’re just about ready for bed. Then, in the morning rush, we walk right by it.

Why? It’s more convenient to just ignore it in the morning and we’re too tired to deal with it in the evening.

A solution presents itself. Fill up a laundry basket in our bedroom in the evening and place it right in front of the door so that we’ll trip over it in the morning if we don’t deal with it. Then, when we go downstairs in the morning, we carry the basket down and we’re pretty much ready to drop in a load of laundry on our way out the door. I’ve started doing this and it actually really works.

Why It Works: The Path of Least Resistance
In the normal routine of our lives, we almost constantly take the path of least resistance when it comes to choosing what to do. What’s the path of least resistance to get from where we are now to where we want to be? We do this over and over and over again.

The only problem is that when we choose this “path of least resistance,” we often aren’t choosing the best path. If only we would choose to take some extra effort right now to remove some of that resistance, we might find a much more effective path to get where we want to go.

For example, the “path of least resistance” for me to figure out my finances was to use a spreadsheet because Microsoft Money didn’t do what I wanted. Of course, as I found out, the spreadsheet itself had significant resistance, so now I’m trying to use Quicken along with my spreadsheet (and maybe not even with my spreadsheet) to reduce that resistance, making the whole thing much more usable.

Another example: the “path of least resistance” for doing laundry was to just let it build up then do a bunch at once. The only problem was that we essentially would devote an entire day to laundry (usually Saturday was laundry day). I can reduce that big resistance by just filling up a basket before bed (a tiny resistance) and then carrying it down in the morning (another tiny resistance).

When you do the “five whys,” you’ll eventually find your way to the resistances in your life that are keeping you from what you want to be doing. When you dig into those resistances and find ways to break them, you make it much easier to go down the path you want to go down.

Why do you spend so much money each month? You might dig down and find that certain places tempt you, so just by avoiding them, you don’t spend as much. You might find that certain friends convince you to spend more, so focus on spending more time with your other friends.

Why aren’t you succeeding at work? You might dig down and find that it’s because you’re afraid to volunteer for projects, so you might overcome that by simply resolving to take the plunge on the next project that comes through. You might find that the politics of your workplace encourage you to avoid stepping up or that the entire company is poisoned, which might indicate it’s time to move on in your career.

You can use “the five whys” in every aspect of your life. If you spend some time thinking through the problems in your life in this way, you’ll almost always dig down from something that seems insurmountable to something that you can fix. That fix might lead to the big change you want or it might not, but no matter what, it’ll almost always change the dynamics of your life for the better.

This effect, in which we act “better” when we believe we’re being observed by others, is called the Hawthorne effect, and it’s surprisingly powerful.

It’s easy to see examples of this almost every day in our lives. If we’re out with people we don’t know well and are trying to impress, we’re going to focus intensely on putting our best foot forward. We’ll dress well, attempt to be good conversationalists, and try hard to put positive character traits on display. On the other hand, when we’re home alone watching television, we’ll often put on old raggy comfortable clothes and curl up on the couch without combing our hair or anything like that.

Let’s carry that forward a bit. Let’s say we’re at a store with a friend and that friend is watching us as we make up our mind about whether or not to make a purchase. Simply by observing, that friend has an effect on whether we buy.

I see it even in my own life. If my financially conservative friend John is watching, I’ll tend to not buy the item and walk away. On the other hand, if one of my other heavy-spending friends is watching, I’ll lean more towards buying the item. The observer doesn’t have to actively participate at all in my purchase – simply by being there, they impact my choice.

In short, I tend to lean towards a “best behavior” in the eyes of whoever is observing me. That “best behavior,” though, changes based on who is doing the observing.

Some of you may scoff at this at first glance, but imagine yourself in situations in your life and how your actions and choices in those situations change depending on who is there and who isn’t.

For me, the intriguing part of the Hawthorne effect is how it can reinforce positive behaviors in your life. Just choose to surround yourself with people who reinforce the behaviors you want to exhibit.

So, for example, if I’m going to go do some comparison shopping for Christmas gifts with a friend, I’m far better off choosing to go with John than with other people. Why? John’s mere presence encourages me to dig for values in the gifts that I buy and not just go for the splashy gift, while others, by their mere presence, will encourage me to just go for the “awesome” gift without strong planning or thought.

If I’m trying to break a habit of drinking socially, I’m better off spending social time with friends that don’t drink. Again, just by their powers of observation, I’m more likely to make the appropriate choice. Of course, the reverse is true – if I enjoy drinking socially, I should choosse friends who also enjoy it.

If I want to go the extra mile at work and look like a winner, I should try to get into group projects with people who are really productive – the “stars” of the company – instead of people who just sit around and complain. On the other hand, if I’m just interested in passing the time at work, I should seek out those who are doing the bare minimum.

What kind of person do you want to be? It’s much easier to find the path to where you want to go if the people around you are on that same path. Just by their presence, you’ll innately want to please them with your actions, so you’ll make choices with them that lead you towards your own personal goals.

The Hawthorne effect really works. More and more, I gravitate towards friends and work associates that are the kind of people that I want to be.

Keeping score is an easy way for me to know how well I’m doing. It lets me judge, in a very clear way, whether I’m improving and whether I’m making forward progress towards my goals.

For a long time, I was obsessed with keeping score in various aspects of my life against other people. I’d keep score with the various gadgets we had. I’d keep score with who had the best trading card collections. I’d keep score with who had the best-stocked liquor cabinet.

What I found, though, is that keeping score against other people in such ways left me feeling empty. Every day – every hour, even – there was another way to keep score against someone else, and I could never win all the battles or even most of them. Even worse, when I would lay my head on my pillow at night, it was just me. There was no one to keep score against, and even if I had a higher “score” in some aspect of life than others, most of the time I was left unfulfilled by that.

Over time, I began to find a lot of power in keeping my own score.

Net Worth
The primary way I “keep my own score” is by calculating my net worth quite frequently. I use my net worth as a score to judge whether or not I’m making successful, smart moves towards improving my personal finance state. I “win” if my net worth goes up. I “win big” if my net worth goes up by some specific amount each month.

Calculating your net worth is quite easy. Simply make a list of all of your debts and another list of all of your assets. Add up your assets, add up your debts, then subtract your debts from your assets. The resulting number is your net worth.

I calculate my net worth each month. I use a simple spreadsheet to do this – here’s how you can build one exactly like it.

Using Net Worth to “Keep Score”
Each month, when I calculate my net worth, I “keep score” in three different ways.

First, I compare my net worth to the previous month’s net worth. Obviously, I strive to have this go up each month, but during months where there are car repairs and other issues, it doesn’t. If I don’t see a decent increase from month to month – and having calculated this many times, I know what to expect – I’ll start digging for “why” this didn’t happen in order to improve my game.

Second, I compare my net worth to my net worth one year ago. This must be an increase – and hopefully, a sizeable one. I do this mostly to help me realize how far I’ve come over the past year, as it’s often an amazing reminder (particularly when compared to annual income) how our hard work is paying off.

Third, I look at the goals I set at the end of last month. Each month, I set goals for the coming month. Usually, these are “thirty day projects” of some kind, where I’m trying to teach myself a new normal behavior or two. One month, it might be minimizing our grocery bills to teach myself how to get the nutritious foods we need for less. Another month, I might go without spending a single dollar on entertainment. At the end of the month, I’ll reflect on how the goal went and see how it impacted my net worth – it’s usually a positive impact. Even better, I’ve usually picked up a good behavior or two by doing things this way.

Obviously, I also set goals for the next month. I usually pick a “target number” to shoot for – think of it as trying to beat one’s high score at an arcade game. I also usually define a “thirty day project” of some sort – sometimes two – to help me master a good behavior or two that will reflect well on my financial state.

During the month, if I feel like I’m on the verge of making mistakes, I’ll often calculate my net worth just as a quick reminder. It’s much like playing a game and glancing up at the score at the top of the screen – a quick reminder of how well you’re doing and a bit of a push to keep up the good work.

In a nutshell, keeping score is a key part of how I keep my personal finance in balance. It keeps me motivated and focused without causing me to “compete” in areas that are detrimental to my overall goals (like getting into “gadget wars” with friends).

Add that all together – plus the usual issues with a busy household with two young kids – and I’m feeling the stress. I’ve not had time as of late to exercise with all of the demands on me, either, which is something that really has been useful over the last year for keeping me energetic.

One major thing I’ve noticed is how this has all directly affected my personal choices when it comes to spending. To put it simply, I’ve been more tempted than I have been in a long time to spend money without really thinking about it. In fact, just a few weeks ago, I wrote about one experience along those lines.

I’m not alone in noticing this phenomenon. In this article on MoneyCentral about stress and spending, the author makes the astute point that we often spend to relieve stress in the short term, but it adds up to additional stress in the long term.

I’ll absolutely agree with part of that. Overspending today will unquestionably lead to more stress in the long term. If you spend money today on something purely impulsive, you won’t have money to spend tomorrow on something genuinely important to you. That $30 impulse buy today means you stay in debt for a little longer and pay a little bit more interest along the way.

However, I think there are at least two more connections between stress and spending not addressed in that article that I’ve noticed in my own behavior.

First, when you’re stressed, you’re simply not as mindful as you might otherwise be. Normally, when I’m in a buying situation, I’m pretty mindful of the situation. I recognize the temptations around me and the subtle cues I’m being fed to buy more than I should.

When I’m stressed, though, I’m distracted. Stress is caused by something that’s on your mind, sapping away at your consciousness. When that happens, those subtle buying cues become radically more effective. Instead of rationally looking at the situations you’re in, you look at it with less than your full attention – and those subtle little cues take over.

Second, stress pulls you away from those important to you, and sometimes you overcompensate. While finishing up my manuscript and rushing to make my deadline, I’ve found myself working into the wee small hours of the night many nights. This leaves me exhausted the next morning – and I recognize that I’m not quite as “there” for my children as I normally am in the morning.

Then, when my son, who’s been wonderful through all of this, will innocently turn to me and ask, “Dad… can we go bowling?” or something similar, and that perfectly plays on my desire to do fun things with my children combined directly with my sense that I’ve not been doing quite as well as I have been lately. The end result? I’m far, far more susceptible to saying “Sure!” and going bowling than I would be under less stress.

To put it simply, a higher stress level makes it more likely that you’ll spend unnecessarily. Thus, the reverse is true: if you can reduce your stress level, it’s likely that you’ll also reduce the prevalence of frivolous spending in your life.

Having said that, here are the five stress-reduction techniques that work best for me.

Focus on what’s stressing you. I find that distraction and avoidance usually make me more stressed out. Instead, if I actually focus on what’s stressing me and attempt to come up with a real solution for the problem, I not only feel better in the short term, but I also contribute to a better long-term solution as well.

Talk about what’s stressing you. My wife is a wonderful listener. Find someone who will listen to you rant and rail about what’s bothering you. It’s cathartic.

Meditate. Spending twenty minutes praying or meditating deeply can really clear your mind of a lot of detritus and put you in a much calmer place. I find more rest in meditating for twenty minutes than in sleeping for two hours.

Exercise. Whenever I consistently exercise, my energy level is significantly higher, plus my stress level is naturally lower. I find that I feel much more able to deal with the challenges of life.

Eliminate a less-important life element. One big cause of stress is an overstuffed schedule. If you’re in this situation, seek out an element of your life that you can let go for a while and just let it go. Perhaps it means withdrawing from a community group. Maybe it means slowing down your schedule of washing the carpets. Whatever it is, step back and give yourself some breathing room in life.

The lower the stress, the less you spend.

Figuring this out has truly been world-changing to me. It’s helped me to retain good ideas, remember to do certain things, and record data that I’ll need later on (like addresses and phone numbers and such).

One of the big reasons this has been such a step forward for me is that, by default, I have a forgetful mind in terms of short-term things that I need to do. I’m great at remembering long-term things, like the date in 1989 when I had my appendix removed, but short-term things slip my mind all the time if I’m not careful.

Most of the time, such slippage is no big deal, but when it comes to things like remembering to, say, pay the electric bill, it can be a big deal. I have been late on bills before simply because I forgot to pay them – not because I didn’t want to pay them or couldn’t afford to pay them. The same phenomenon holds true for other personal finance tasks, like remembering to rebalance an account or to check on my children’s 529.

Luckily, such incidences are becoming much less frequent as I figure out more and more techniques to keep me from forgetting such things.

Automatic transfers and bill payments have perhaps been the most useful tool for me in this regard. Every payment I have that has a static payment amount – meaning it’s the same every single month – is automated. I also have a number of automatic transfers into multiple savings accounts that are geared for specific goals.

An “inbox” is always in place on my desk. Whenever a new bill or other item to deal with comes in, I put it in that inbox and it stays there until it’s dealt with. I just go through the items in it two or three times a week and deal with what I find there.

A daily “to-do” list posted in several places reminds me of the things I need to do every day – in other words, defining my normal daily routine. I even include such mundane things as my hygiene routine on this list, but it also includes things like daily work tasks. I also have an instance of “check your idea notebook” and other such things on it.

Google Calendar helps me keep my schedule straight. I have monthly reminders of several different bills and other personal finance tasks on there. These calendar entries automatically send me reminder emails as the day gets closer. Beyond that, I also have every birthday and other event that I can possibly need to remember on it – and these also send reminders to me.

A strong mail-handling routine also helps things from falling through the cracks. All mail is collected in a central place in our home (the entryway table) and is processed in a batch once or twice a week, with all junk mail getting tossed and all bills going in my personal inbox. Doing a batch processing of the mail and having a prescribed way to handle all of the pieces keeps individual pieces from falling through the cracks.

The end result of all of this is that I rarely forget important little things. I don’t rely on my brain to keep all of this stuff straight – instead, there’s a “net” of safeguards and systems that help me to not lose anything through the cracks.

Isn’t it all kind of redundant? Yes, in several places in the system, I’ll see multiple reminders of the same thing. It can be kind of annoying to see mentions of my parents’ anniversary in three different areas.

However, such redundancy pretty much ensures that something important won’t slip by unhandled. I’d rather have three notices of my parents’ anniversary and remember it than just one notice and forget it.

If you have as strong a tendency towards short-term forgetfulness as I can have at times, it’s really useful to get a system in place that’s redundant and really easy to maintain. This system works well for me.

What I found is that I would absorb a few good ideas or techniques, but I would have absolutely no desire to go out in the kitchen and actually employ these new ideas and techniques. Instead, I always had this vague sense that I had somehow already accomplished the cooking effort for the day, so instead I would prepare something incredibly easy and call it good enough.

My only success, in fact, came when I would actually be in the kitchen preparing the meal at the same time as the hosts. I would do this by using the DVR, pausing when I needed to. If I didn’t do that, I usually wouldn’t bother. Not always – there were rare exceptions to this – but usually.

What I found instead is that if I actually wanted to prepare a meal in the kitchen, I was a lot better off reading about the technique and visualizing myself doing it. If I had no idea, I could always watch a YouTube video, but usually a passage from a technique-heavy cookbook like Joy of Cooking and some imagination would do the trick.

I never really thought about this again until recently, when I had a long chat with a guy who has a side business revolving around home repair and remodeling. He related a very similar experience to my own. Whenever he’d catch a show or two of a program like This Old House, his motivation to actually get out and do something went straight downhill.

What do these two experiences have in common? After watching someone else accomplish something, we felt much less compelled to go out and accomplish the same thing ourselves and, often, felt a subtle sense of having actually accomplished something merely by watching someone else do it.

There’s a biological explanation for this: mirror neurons.

Mirror neurons are neurons (i.e., pieces of the brain) that fire both when a person acts and when a person observes the same action performed by another. In other words, parts of our brain respond exactly the same when we do something or when we watch someone else do that same exact thing. Like, for example, preparing a meal or watching Paula Deen prepare one, or do a home repair project or watch Bob Vila do that same project.

To put it simply, we often get the same feeling from watching someone else do something that we would get from doing things ourselves.

When you think about it this way, it pops up time and time again in our lives. We feel happy when we read about someone else experiencing happiness and sad when they experience sadness. We feel a sense of accomplishment and joy when the hero overcomes adversity. We feel fear when the monster is sneaking up behind the hero on screen, even though there’s no monster in the room with us.

And, quite often, those emotional rushes are enough to fulfill us, reducing our drive to actually accomplish things.

Let me put it as simply as I can. If you want to succeed, do. If you want to follow, watch.

After a period of watching a lot of Food Network shows, I began to realize that I wasn’t actually becoming a better cook or, frankly, cooking much of anything at all. Instead, I began to read a lot more about cooking, often in the kitchen with the book open in front of me as I mixed something up and threw it in the oven.

The same phenomenon repeated itself when I dug deep into my own personal finance recovery. I would read lots of tips and often feel a strong sense that my finances were already in better shape because I had read it. It was only by continually pushing myself that I was able to actually improve my financial life, not just rely on mirror neurons to give me a sense that it was improving.

Watching and reading about someone else’s success is a great starting point for your own success. But that’s all it is, a starting point. It’s up to you to take the next step and actually do something. Don’t trick yourself into a false sense of accomplishment just because you watched someone else succeed with these tactics.

What are you going to do today?

I crawled out as they were laughing and high-fiving each other, grinned, shrugged it off, and went on about my business. It was the right attitude to take. A few other seventh graders provided an enormous reaction to the situation – telling the principal, throwing fits, challenging the much older kids to fights. Those reactionary kids were subjected to ever-escalating forms of bullying and hazing, while the ones who just shrugged it off were at worst ignored and at best given an occasional positive recognition from the much older kids.

Now that we’re all adults, we might think that such bullying has been left behind. This is playground fodder, after all – the nonsense and torments of high school is in the past for most of us, right?

The truth is that even as adults, we’re subjected to bullying in various, more subtle ways – and our reactions to that bullying often determines our futures.

Don’t believe me? Take these ideas into account.

Advertising is a form of bullying. The purpose of an ad is to make you somehow feel less adequate if you don’t have the product they’re pitching. In essence, it’s psychological bullying – the point is to make you feel inadequate while the people who have the product are superior to you.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” is a form of bullying. Again, when your peers have certain status objects, these objects can subtly make you feel jealous and make you feel less adequate than you once did. They have a nice new car and you do not – why not? Again, when you buy into the “keeping up with the Joneses” mindset, you’re agreeing to feel superior when you have things they do not and inferior when they have things you do not – mutual bullying.

A boss like Bill Lumbergh, forcing you to work on Saturday and Sunday, is a bully. He’s a bully because he has power over your freedom and he knows it. Such a boss knows that you’re financially reliant on the job you have and that your situation in life, if you were to be fired, would be disastrous. So he uses that power like a club to beat you into submission and to make you give more and more of your time and life energy to the organization.

Fortunately, we have weapons that we can use to fight against financial bullying.

The biggest tool is an appropriate sense of “enough.” You don’t need more things. You don’t need better things. If you’re reading this, in all likelihood, you already have abundance in life. Sure, it’s fine to have some desires, but those things are just that – desires. They don’t define who you are and they aren’t a requirement for living. You already have enough.

Another tool is self-confidence. You don’t need products to make yourself worthwhile – you already are worthwhile. You’re surrounded by people who care about you. You have countless opportunities to do many, many things every day to make the world a better place.

Yet another tool is financial independence. If you’ve been careful with your spending and put yourself in a position so that if you did lose a job it would not be the end of your world, then you’ve got a great deal of financial independence. You can’t be beaten down due to your “need” of a salary any longer, which gives you the freedom to take risks at work and explore new potential areas of employment without panicking or being afraid.

In the end, the solution to bullying is up to you. Do you choose to let the world tell you what to do? Or do you choose to walk your own path with your head held high?

Sarah, after being off all summer, returns to work at the end of August, leaving me alone at home many days with my thoughts and my work. This also means that the children’s daycare attendance increases as well.

The house goes from noisy and happy to empty and quiet. Even as I attempt to fill it with music and NPR, it still feels somehow vacant and still. The liveliness is gone – no more children’s laughter floating up the stairs to cheer me while I’m working and no more occasional interruptions by Sarah just to let me know she’s thinking of me.

Unsurprisingly, my mood slips a little bit. I tend to get more caught up in details – and I also have a greater tendency to get distracted.

Perhaps most worrying is that I have a greater tendency to spend without really thinking about it. It’s the old “comfort” thing – I’m unhappy with the way things are, but if I buy something, I’ll feel better about it.

Over the past few weeks, that feeling has manifested itself several times. I bought a few books and a couple board games that I would have never bought.

On Monday, it manifested itself incredibly clearly, in a way that almost shocked me. My kids both needed some new socks and perhaps a few new pairs of pants, as fall is coming on and their supply of well-fitting long pants is pretty small. Buying the socks and pants wasn’t the problem, though.

After I left the store, I stopped by a gaming shop on a pure impulse. I was just walking past it and it crossed my mind to stop in and say hello to one of the employees that I knew.

Almost before I thought about it, I left with a game under my arm.

Many people might say, “So what?” I don’t buy myself many items. The few things I do buy myself are bargain-shopped to death. So why not live a little?

Here’s the problem: the game doesn’t solve the problem that is making me unhappy – in fact, it just makes it a little worse.

The piece of my situation that makes me unhappy is not seeing my wife and children as much as I’d like. I love spending time with them and, after spending so much time together with them all summer long, I miss them.

Buying a game is a short term panacea – it might bring me a fleeting sense of enjoyment, but in the long run, I could have easily just played one of the other games in our board game collection in the basement closet.

I know what the solution to that problem is. If I keep my nose to the grindstone each day, I can take more time off and go do fun things with my children. If I take advantage of the writing and presentation opportunities I have, perhaps my wife can take a year or two off from her job while the children are young (I know quite well that she’s doing the work she loves and that she simply wouldn’t permanently choose not to do it). If I’m careful with my spending, I can open the door to some amazing experiences in my children’s future.

If I had chosen not to spend the $30 on the game, I could have tossed that money into a savings account. If I had simply chosen not to wander into that store, I would have had an extra hour to focus on finishing up my book or writing a stellar article.

It’s easy to say that I’m being too hard on myself. On the other hand, if I don’t keep an eye on the little choices, the big dreams start to float away.

In the end, the truth is simple: if you’re buying things to console yourself, ask yourself if that purchase is really going to solve your problem. Is buying a new video game going to make it easier for you to interact with people socially? Is buying a new wardrobe going to help you get into better shape? Is restocking your liquor cabinet going to make it easier to actually invite people over? is buying a new car going to help you get a date?

The answer to each of these things is “no.” The solution to these problems doesn’t come from buying things. They come from making authentic changes in your life – how you interact with others, how you work, and how you take care of yourself. They might put a little bit of grease on the skids, but if you can’t get the engine moving forward on your own, all the grease in the world won’t make a difference – and you’ll find, in the end, that you wasted a lot of time and money and energy on that useless grease.

Put your wallet back in your pocket and ask yourself one thing: what is it that you really want? The more of your energy you put towards that real goal, the better off you’ll feel about yourself over the long haul.

(The Simple Dollar podcast is on a one (or possibly two) week hiatus while I finish my book. It’ll return to your Tuesday afternoons shortly.)

In response to my recent article, Are Poor People Lazy?, where I concluded that laziness doesn’t always equate to poverty and vice versa, Pamela left this comment:

There are many factors that lead a person to the life they are living. I am quite shy. No matter how much I socialize no matter how many times I try to assert myself I remain shy. Because of this I do not take classes or do many of the things suggested for me to do to get ahead in life. So according to you I am lazy. NOT SO. If allowed I would work 12 hour days at my job.
I also agree with many of the comments that being in the right place at the right time can have a more positive outcome on you life than anything.

For most of my life, I’ve been very shy. Sometimes, I’ve been able to cover it up by essentially adopting another persona – simply pretending to be someone else who was outgoing – but that would only work for short stretches. Usually, I would just maintain that level of false outgoingness until I could get out of the situation.

I told myself that it was impossible to be any different than that. It was a convenient excuse, as are all excuses that take us away from great opportunities in life.

In truth, adopting that “outgoing” persona, escaping social situations, and believing I was just shy and nothing could be done about it was merely taking the path of least resistance in life. In other words, it was the easiest path available to me. Being more social and extroverted was far outside my comfort zone – it was a lot easier to just put on a mask, get through the situation, and remain introverted.

It has taken me a very long time to grow beyond that level of introversion and shyness. I’ve had a lot of painful social interactions along the way, and I’ve practiced in ways that would have seemed ludicrous to me years ago.

Now, though, I feel completely fine starting up conversations with people I’ve just met. I can lead conversations with others, as well as follow their lead, and I actually enjoy it because of the human interaction as well as learning a lot of things along the way.

Being more social has opened up a lot of avenues for me. I’ve met interesting people, gained some public speaking opportunities, and built a lot of friendships in the community.

If I had just continued to follow the path of least resistance, I would have never had these opportunities.

Is the path of least resistance laziness? Some might argue that it is – I don’t. People can work quite hard on the tasks that they’re most comfortable with.

However, opportunity rewards people who step outside their comfort zone. The Einstein quote that starts this article really sums it up: if you just keep doing things the same way over and over again, you’ll keep getting the same results. If you don’t like the results you’re getting in some aspect of your life – your economic situation, your personal situation, your health, and so on – it’s time to take a new path, one that’s not easy.

Find it hard to be social? Read Never Eat Alone and How to Win Friends and Influence People and start acting on what you read.

Find it hard to lose weight? Start exercising every day, even if it’s hard, and throw out most of the junk food. Try drinking water instead of soda – it’ll be hard at first, but fighting through that resistance is what will make change happen.

Find it hard to learn and grow your knowledge? Turn off the television and read books on subjects that you don’t know much about. If they’re over your head, back off and read simpler ones first.

Find it hard to execute some particular skill? Use your spare time and practice it, even if practice seems difficult and you’d rather be doing something else. Play the guitar until your fingers hurt. Cook every meal for a month from scratch.

Find it hard to get out of debt? Cut up all of your credit cards and erase those numbers from all of your online accounts and learn how to live on what you have.

Once you’ve broken through some personal barriers, you’ll find that opportunity knocks more often than before. You’ll understand the world around you better – and people will interact with you in a more positive fashion.

It’s hard to change course, but if you keep doing what you’re doing now, you’re going to keep getting the same results. Now’s the time to get off that path of least resistance and try the hard way.

I’m good at restraining my impulsive nature. I don’t simply go into stores and then emerge later with a hefty bag, a credit card bill, and a dazed look on my face. Still, in certain places, I am strongly tempted to spend. I look around and see tons of items that I’d like to have. Here are seven places that really fuel my spending desires.

Bookstores What can I say? I love to read – I read about ten books a month for my own enjoyment and probably five more for The Simple Dollar and other professional purposes. The smell and feel and sight of a new book is like manna to me. I usually resist most of my impulses by arguing to myself that I can get those books at the library or off of PaperBackSwap, but it’s definitely a struggle – one I don’t always win.

Williams-Sonoma As I get more and more adept in the kitchen, I’m slowly upgrading my kitchen equipment to superior versions of the cheap (and sometimes problematic) equipment I have on hand. Williams-Sonoma does an extremely good job of convincing me to accelerate this upgrade process, enticing me with better knives, a wide array of very nice pots and pans, and lots of other items.

Wineries If I stop at a winery and enjoy a tasting, I usually wind up buying at least a bottle. There’s something about the atmosphere of a winery that gets me into the right mindset, and adding onto that is the fact that I truly enjoy a glass of a distinctive wine, it’s unsurprising that I often leave wineries with a bottle or two in my bag.

Food co-ops Stores that put obvious care into their food selection often entice me to be much more willing to buy foods impulsively. At regular grocery stores, I usually avoid impulsive food purchases by knowing that the item is usually going to be full of ingredients I shouldn’t be eating or won’t taste all that good. At a food co-op, that’s often not the case at all – and thus I’ll find myself picking up items like feta made from sheep’s milk.

Gaming shops I love playing games against family and friends and gaming shops tend to bring out my strongest tendencies. I particularly like board games, and if I witness a game demonstration and the game seems fun at all, I’ll often be very tempted to talk myself into buying it.

Art supply stores My biggest weaknesses in art supply stores usually come down to notebooks/sketch books and writing implements. I can easily fill up notebooks with jotted notes, quotes, ideas, and other things, and the feel of a good pen in my hand is almost intoxicating and actually does a good job of fueling my writing tendencies.

The Apple Store I usually don’t buy anything at Apple Stores. Instead, they just do a great job of convincing me to save up and spend much more than I should to buy a MacBook Pro or a new desktop machine or an iPod Touch. Apple puts a lot of care into the little details of their devices and, after spending a lot of time using them, I’ve come to really miss them when I use other devices.

There, my confessions. Putting them all down on paper like that is fairly refreshing for me, as it helps me to realize that I use quite a few different techniques to minimize the temptation to spend in those places. I’ve mentioned some of these tactics before in various other articles, of course, but here are eight different tactics that I use to minimize the negative influence that these tempting places have on my wallet.

Avoid them entirely. The easiest way not to be tempted is to simply not visit these stores at all. This works to a certain extent. For years, I had a routine of going to a bookstore each Tuesday (to check out the new releases) and each Friday (to “celebrate” the end of a workweek). This routine usually meant that I would wind up buying a book or two at each visit, which could easily add up to $40 a week.

By simply breaking that routine, it was easy to see a tremendous amount of financial benefit – as much as $2,000 per year. While I still do visit bookstores on occasion, they’re no longer part of any sort of routine. This makes the individual visits much more enjoying, since they’re more infrequent and not based on any sort of schedule.

Take notes. If you visit a store, fall in love with lots of items, and are tempted to buy, stop. Pull out a notepad and write down all of the things that are tempting you. List the books, food ideas, clothing, games, or other items that are really intriguing you.

This serves two purposes. First, you can take the list home and do further research on the item(s) and some comparison shopping. Second, it allows you to utilize the “thirty day rule,” where you agree not to buy the item for thirty days and then re-evaluate at the end of the period whether or not you actually want the item.

Go with only cash. If you visit a place with such obvious temptations, leave your wallet behind. Just take in a small amount of cash, whatever you’re completely comfortable with spending there and won’t feel guilty about afterwards. So, if you’re going to a bookstore, take a $20 bill. This allows you to splurge a little, but prevents you from spending more than you should.

The real key here is to not bring in plastic, which effectively gives you access to far more money that you might otherwise have. Without strong willpower, credit cards can be a real danger, so it can be good to avoid them until you do have the personal fortitude to avoid over-the-top spending with them.

Go with the right kind of friend. Some friends encourage you to spend. They talk up the items they see, complement you on your choices and taste, and encourage you to splurge a little. Those kinds of friends will almost always cause you to have a bigger bill than you want.

I prefer shopping with either my wife or my closest friend, John. Neither one of them encourages me to spend more than I should. My wife usually makes no comment whatsoever if I choose to make a purchase. John usually just criticizes items in a humorous way, making them seem less appealing while also being entertaining. The end result? I buy less than I would if I were there with a heavy-spending friend.

Set an explicit budget. Each month, I allot myself a certain amount of money to spend on whatever I wish. Since I plan for it, I can spend that money without guilt, and this money is often spent at the places I described above.

Since I know what that limit is, I can spend up to that limit without any sort of guilt whatsoever. If I’m at Williams-Sonoma and see an item that costs two or three months’ worth of free money, I’m patient with it. I’ll wait two months without spending much “mad money,” then pick up that item without any guilt at all.

This is perhaps my most-used technique, and my wife uses it as well.

Use the ten second rule. Sometimes, on an impulsive whim, you’ll pick up an item and make the split-second decision to buy it. As you head to the cashier, stop for ten seconds and ask yourself if you really need this item after all, or if you couldn’t get a better deal on it elsewhere.

For me, this works quite well to at least slow impulse buys. I’ll usually put the item back and add it to my list (see the earlier tip). It doesn’t necessarily mean that I won’t end up with the item in the future, but it will be bought with a rational, not an impulsive, mind.

Never go without a purpose. And, no, social engagements aren’t a purpose.

Why are you shopping? If you’re doing it just to spend time with a friend – or even mostly to spend time with a friend – your wallet will thank you if you find something else to do. Why not go through the stuff you already have? Why not spend time in a public place that’s not designed to convince you to spend money?

If you actually do go shopping somewhere, particularly in places that you know tempt you to spend money, make sure you’re going with a specific purpose. There’s a book you want to pick up. There’s a French oven you want to look at. You have some technical questions about your MacBook. You get the idea.

Find a substitute. Remember above, when I mentioned that I’d buy three or four books a week at the bookstore? Sure, I did read most of these books, but very rarely more than once. So, why not use the library?

Most of the big temptations above have great substitutes for me. Instead of going to game stores (usually to talk and browse games), I visit a few community gaming websites to get most of the same effect. Instead of hitting food stores, I use farmers markets for the same effects. This helps me stay away from many of my worst temptations.

What places tempt you the most? And what techniques do you use to control your spending there?

A few days ago, an old friend of mine wrote to me about The Simple Dollar. She’d been reading the archives for a while and had finally caught up with the most recent posts. One of her comments was quite interesting and worth discussing:

The articles I didn’t like were when you listed tips for cutting your spending. Most of them are just simply outside the realm of possibility. Most people don’t want to do a bunch of extra work or do something really unenjoyable or ruin something fun just to save a few bucks.

Her example actually revolved around a tip she found on the site where I suggested making sandwiches on vacations instead of eating out for every meal:

I’m on vacation to have fun. Eating a “sandwich” that consists of some awful lunchmeat jammed between two pieces of dry bread does not equal fun. I just simply won’t do it, and most people won’t, either.

Since I couldn’t find the tip she mentioned after searching for an hour, I’ll explain it in more detail in a “mini-post” right now – two posts in one!

A Frugal Vacation Tip From My Childhood
We rarely went on vacations when I was a child. The only true vacation that we went on before I was in high school – meaning a trip that wasn’t either camping within 50 miles of home or visiting relatives – was a trip to Saint Louis in 1986 with my parents, one of my brothers, and one of my cousins.

We didn’t have a huge budget for the five day trip, so my parents used several techniques to save money. My father got discount Six Flags and baseball tickets through his credit union in some sort of package deal. All five of us shared a single room with one large bed, leaving us three kids to sleep on the floor. At least two of the days, we didn’t do anything at all – instead, we either just stayed at the hotel in the pool much of the day or wandered around Saint Louis near our hotel, exploring.

But one big trick that my parents used on this trip was to eat sandwiches for every lunch on the trip. The day before we left, my parents bought several loaves of bread, some cheese, and some bologna from a local deli counter, along with some condiments and chips. Each day for lunch, we’d either gather in the hotel room and make sandwiches at lunch time or we’d pack a lunch in the morning and eat it when we were out and about.

We plowed through several loaves of bread, a few packages of bologna, a few packages of cheese, and a bottle of ketchup and mustard, but the total cost of the food was less than $15 – and it provided five lunches for five people. Compare that to the cost of eating out … anything. It was a huge savings – it likely amounted to getting our hotel room for free.

Since then, I’ve been a big believer of making picnic lunches while traveling whenever there’s a reasonable opportunity to do so. Often, on long road trips, we’ll stop at an exit and instead of hitting a restaurant, we’ll stop at a park, pop open the back, and dig into the sandwiches we packed – or stop at a grocery store, pick up a loaf of bread and a few other items, and head to a park to make our own sandwiches (and save the inevitable left over bread).

It’s cheaper and healthier and almost as fast as the other options.

So, here we have it. I like to make my own sandwiches for lunches on road trips and vacations, but my friend comments that such tactics are “outside the realm of possibility” as it degrades the quality of the vacation just to save a few bucks.

This type of phenomenon pops up time and time again. It might be “outside the realm of possibility” to pry that morning coffee from your hands. It might be “outside the realm of possibility” to drive a ten year old car (my truck is thirteen years old! I must be a loser!). It might be “outside the realm of possibility” to make your own laundry detergent. You wouldn’t even think of doing such things.

But why?

Here’s the way I look at the world. If something has an obvious benefit, I’ll consider it instead of brushing it off immediately. Most money-saving tactics fall straight into this category – so, in this example, the obvious benefit of making such sandwiches is that they’re healthier than fast food and quite a bit cheaper.

The obvious benefit of trimming out a morning coffee is that you save $5 every morning and break a caffeine addiction.

The obvious benefit of driving an old vehicle is that you’re not spending money on a new car payment.

The obvious benefit of making your own laundry detergent is that your detergent is about 1/10th the cost of detergent bought at the store.

Thus, I’m willing to at least consider most frugal tactics – I don’t immediately rule them as being outside the realm of possibility.

Obviously, each of these options has some sort of cost.

A sandwich on a trip is likely not going to be quite as tasty as going to a restaurant, and you’ll likely be eating in a park instead of a restaurant (with kids, this latter part is an advantage, but it might not be for others).

Trimming your morning coffee means that you’re either drinking lower quality coffee or you’re giving it up entirely. Maybe you can just move from the Starbucks routine to making your own (a big savings right there) or just try different brands to find one that suits you (for example, my wife reports that Eight O’Clock Coffee is the best bang for the buck out there).

An old vehicle is somewhat less reliable and likely gets worse gas mileage. These two factors pushed us to upgrade our car earlier this year, moving from a 1999 Mercury Sable with a failing transmission and about 24 MPG to a 2009 Toyota Prius that gets 46 MPG. We debated the upgrade for the better part of a year.

Making your own laundry detergent takes about fifteen minutes, so it’s really a factor of how you value your free time in the evenings or on weekends.

In some cases, I’ll go for it – I’m still driving my old rust-bucket truck, I make my own laundry detergent, I make sandwiches on the road, and I don’t drink coffee anymore at all (aside from a once-a-month or so treat).

Others might balk at one or more of those choices, choosing to stick with what they’re already doing or a more expensive route. I do this with many food choices – I’ll buy eggs from a local farmer at a premium, for example.

That’s fine – it’s all about personal value. What’s dangerous is not even considering such options and immediately ruling them out of the realm of possibility. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think it comes down to one thing: fear of change.

Frugal choices often require doing things differently than you did before. For some, the thought of changing their routine – even if there’s an obvious net benefit – is bad. This can affect every aspect of one’s life.

Here’s a great example of how powerful routine can be. Once a year, my wife and I spend a day with two of our friends that live about six hours away. It’s usually a “weekend getaway” for them that we interrupt for an afternoon or so. Every single year, though, the two of them choose to go to the same place. They stay in the same hotel. They go to many of the same places. Earlier this year, when we met up, I asked them why. They both shrugged their shoulders and then suggested it was because it was familiar – it fit like an old glove. Choosing something different would just seem… wrong.

The next time you outright reject a frugal choice, ask yourself whether you’re rejecting that frugal choice for a good reason or you’re rejecting it because it would mean you’d have to change a comfortable behavior. Quite often, stepping outside a comfortable behavior can offer huge benefits, not only in the immediate choice, but in that it makes you more flexible and open to other little choices.

Making your own laundry detergent or your own sandwiches on the road isn’t outside the realm of possibility, after all.

In the comments, many people jumped to the conclusion that “poor people are lazy,” which is an extremely broad brush, but a fairly reasonable one. After all, if the difference between high incomes and low incomes is a handful of personal choices and actions, the people not taking them – the people with low incomes – must be lazy, right?

To an extent, I agree. Some poor people are lazy. But so are some rich people. Let’s dig into this a little more.

The Nature of Luck
Let’s take a look at that list of traits that J.D. pointed out:

* They maintain a strong work ethic.
* They don’t watch the clock.
* They seek to improve their skills.
* They do quality work.
* They’re flexible and adaptable.
* They maintain a good social network.
* They possess self-confidence.

Most of the time, opportunities and career paths that lead to a high income are purely a matter of luck. Some people do get all the breaks – others simply don’t.

Luck is about being in the right place at the right time with the right people and the right skills and the right information. If you can be there, opportunities open for you – if you can’t, opportunities will pass you by.

Those traits listed above simply increase your odds of luck. Doing them increases your chances of being in the right place at the right time with the right people and the right skills and the right information.

But great opportunities regularly happen to people who don’t do any of these things. The child of a successful businessman can be lazy and unmotivated, but he gets his foot in the door because of his father. A random joe happens to be standing nearby when someone really needs help in a pinch.

At the same time, you can do all of these things and the opportunities don’t unfold. They help build a business that’s later destroyed by a poor manager. They get sick the night before a big opportunity comes along. They make a bad choice or two when they’re young that haunts them for the rest of their lives.

Poverty and Luck
Here’s the problem, though. Building the traits above takes time. You have to invest time in building a good social network. You have to invest time in quality work. You have to invest time in building skills.

Quite often, in order to have the free time that’s needed to build these things, you need to have a strong, stable income. If you’re currently working a minimum wage job and supporting other people, you’re likely working two or three jobs and you simply don’t have the time to develop these things.

In other words, luck is amplified. Someone who gets a great opportunity due to sheer luck is often able to build up traits that lead to further luck. Someone who doesn’t get that opportunity is often restricted in their ability to build up those traits.

While laziness is indeed a factor in all of this – since lazy people won’t bother to put in the work to build up these traits – luck is another huge factor. A rich person you know may have had a great opportunity or two early on, while another person does not. A poor person might have made a bad choice thirty five years ago that they’re still affected by.

What’s the Solution?
The solution is pretty straightforward – live as cheaply as you can and use your spare time to improve yourself.

Instead of buying a case of beer and watching the ball game, drink some water and work on your skills.

Instead of dropping several hundred dollars on hunting equipment and heading out in the woods every weekend with your buddies, dump that money into weekend classes at the local community college.

Instead of cruising for an hour or two before work, go have lunch with someone up the food chain from yourself and ask for advice.

Instead of doing the minimum at work, go the extra mile when you can, especially when it makes everyone’s lives easier.

Instead of buying gadgets and other toys to “escape” from your situation, put that money in the bank and use it to pay cash for your next vehicle, gradually snowballing your positive financial state.

Keep making these little choices all over your life – and these are choices you can make no matter what your situation – and you’ll find, over time, that those lucky opportunities slowly start unfolding for you.

Fortune favors the prepared. Preparation requires work. So, if you want fortune to favor you, you can’t be lazy.

Poor people aren’t lazy, but lazy people are often poor.

How can you fight off “I’ll do it tomorrow”-ness? My lack of motivation makes me lazy, even though I see the benefits of not being like this.

Procrastination is a big enemy of financial progress. It’s easy to say “I’ll do it tomorrow” about countless maintenance, frugality, and money management tasks. I do it all the time myself, and I’m one of the more proactive people I know.

How do you get around it? How can you make yourself do all of the “important but not urgent” things you need to get done in your life, when it’s so easy to put them off and just kick back?

Here are the tactics I personally use to make it happen.

I don’t overwhelm myself with a to-do list. If you sat down and made a list of all of the little “important but not urgent” things that you need to do in your life, you’d have a monstrous list.

Give it a try right now in your head for the next minute. Just go through your life and think of all of the stuff that you’d like to get done – that’s important to get done – but it’s not urgent. The books and articles you’d like to read. The home and auto maintenance you’d like to get done. The financial tasks you ought to take care of. The people you should get in touch with.

The list will be painfully huge, and it’ll probably seem overwhelming.

Instead, I make a short list each day. Instead of deciding that list is overwhelming, I break it down. I tackle two or three or four of the items on that list every day.

Which ones? If they’re all important and not urgent, it doesn’t matter – I just tackle whatever’s at the top of the list. Sometimes, though, one item or another does take precedence – it’s something that needs to be done regularly.

In that case…

I use Google Calendar to plan the daily list in advance. I just add an all day event for a task that needs to be done and drag it around to whatever day I want to do it. If I have a thing I’d like to do, I just scroll ahead several days and stick it in on the first day that doesn’t have much going on.

The big advantage here is that it allows me to set up recurring events, for things like regular auto or home maintenance or health tasks like setting up a dentist appointment. These automatically appear in place on the day I ought to do them, so I can easily just shuffle stuff around it.

When that daily list is finished, I can kick back without guilt. So, each day I have three or four “important but not urgent” tasks that I should get done – an amount that isn’t overwhelming. I can get through them in a half an hour or an hour or so.

Once they’re done, I’m done. Sure, I have other “important but not urgent” tasks I should get to, but that’s what future days are for. I’ve taken care of what I’ve assigned myself today (which isn’t overwhelming), so I can kick back and play with my kids without feeling I’m letting something down. I know it’s all in place.

If it’s a big task, I break it down into little pieces. Big tasks are easy to postpone, so I break them down. I don’t have a task like “clean the house” or even “clean the office.” It’ll be something simple like “go through the bookshelf in my office.” I don’t do things like “fix my relationship with person X,” I instead do something like “write person X an email” or “give person X a phone call.”

Usually, at the end of such a task that’s just one part of a bigger puzzle, I immediately record the next step that needs to be done as another task. I fire up Google Calendar and jot it down immediately, putting it in place.

I keep a notepad and pen with me so I don’t forget those “important but not urgent” tasks when they come to me. “Important but not urgent” tasks pop into my head all the time. I just keep a notepad with me to jot them down as they come to mind. Once a day or so, I go through the things in my notepad and make sure they’re handled.

Sometimes, I’ll just do those things immediately. Other times, I’ll just toss it up on my calendar, adding another thing that needs to get done.

Always remember that procrastination is the mortal enemy of all of the “important but not urgent” things in your life, and often it’s those things that separate the people who get things done and succeed from those who fall behind.

I go even further: almost every assumption that you base your money decisions – and even your other life decisions – on is a matter of perspective.

Take me. I was born in the country on the banks of the Mississippi River in a quiet region of the Midwest. I graduated in a high school class of 31 people (several of whom now read The Simple Dollar, apparently). I went to a big university (Iowa State U.) where I graduated in a class of several thousand. I’ve worked for businesses. I’ve worked for governments. I’ve worked for myself. I’m married and have children. After living in a city, I now live on the very periphery of a small town and I dream of living in the country once again.

All of these aspects of my life have shaded my perspective time and time again. Let me walk through some examples.

My childhood taught me it was better to be earnest. To put it simply, I tend towards the serious. I often take people at their word, sometimes even when they’re joking.

My childhood also taught me that not having money doesn’t mean you’re stupid or worthless. Many, many people with substantial money seem to act as though people without money are rubes. That’s simply not the case – there are intelligent, well-intentioned, hard-working people at all levels of financial status.

My educational history taught me that there are many different ways to learn. Not everything about an educational experience can be measured, and a school with tons of opportunities can fail a student just as much as a school with few opportunities. It’s up to the student to be successful – a forward-thinking kid can take advantage of any situation.

My educational history also taught me that tests don’t mean much of anything. I was a National Merit Scholar who proceeded to almost flunk out of college at first because I had no idea whatsoever how to study. I spent my childhood just absorbing whatever interested me, which was great for the SAT and high school but terrible for college. I looked great on the SAT, but in a classroom where I didn’t know the material and didn’t care, I floundered big time.

My work career taught me that stability isn’t everything. If you’re in a stable career, you’re often surrounded by complacent people, which makes it difficult to get things done and exciting projects are hard to come by.

My history with investing pushes me towards being conservative. I’ve seen the dot-com bust and the housing bust. Don’t rely on the stock market for anything you’ll need long term. If you need that balance, it shouldn’t be in stocks.

All of the experiences in my life have gelled together to create my perspective on the world. I tend to think that taking someone at their word is usually the right way to go. I tend to overestimate the reliability of jobs – and sometimes overcompensate for that. I tend to underestimate the reliability of the stock market. I tend to not buy into the whole pressurized SAT/ACT/college application experience that high school seems to be. I tend to, if anything, be biased against people who dress in expensive clothes and drive expensive cars.

My life experience has created my perspective on the world. It pushes me subtly towards conservative investing choices. It pushes me towards being a locavore (eating locally grown foods). It pushes me towards being earnest, serious, and forthright with others much of the time. It pushes me towards chasing my dreams instead of seeking the good-paying stable job.

It’s different than your perspective. Your life has taught you different lessons than mine. The things you choose to apply in your life are different than what I choose to apply, and they get different results.

I can’t provide all the answers. No one can. The best I can do is provide my answers and leave the comments open for others to provide theirs. Out of that, perhaps, you can find the direction you need to grow and move onwards.

Quite often, I get emails from people saying “I love The Simple Dollar. I don’t always agree with what you say, but I read it every day and it makes me think.” or something similar. I’d far rather read that than someone saying “Trent, you’re always right.”

Because I’m not even right in my own life much of the time, and I’m certainly not going to be right in your life, either. All I can do is bring my perspective to the table and hope that, when we share ideas, you bring your perspective, too.

Whenever you read something or hear something that you think is wrong, stop and ask yourself this: why is it wrong? The more often you can come up with a real answer for that, the better off you’ll always be in every aspect of your life, financial or otherwise.

Tell me about it. What aspect of your life has given you a perspective different than mine?

Lately, there have been a ton of good books targeting people in their twenties with a burgeoning interest in personal finance, from Dara Duguay’s revised Please Send Money (targeting college students) to Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You to Be Rich (targeting young professional males) to Farnoosh Torabi’s You’re So Money (targeting young professional females) and Michael Masterson’s Automatic Wealth for Grads (targeting young adults with entrepreneurial bents), among many others (check those links – they go straight to my detailed reviews of each book).

So what niche could Beth Kobliner’s Get a Financial Life target? After all, the cover broadcasts the clear subtitle Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties.

The answer’s pretty straightforward: Get a Financial Life focuses pretty directly on the more analytical folks in that age group, the ones who want the facts and want to draw their own conclusions from them. There’s not a lot of attitude or fluff, just a lot of good information compressed into a tight package. If that appeals to you (and you’re in the target age range – twenties and thirties), Get a Financial Life is probably right up your alley.

Let’s dig in.

Get a Grip on Your Financial Life
It all starts with goals. We all have them, but many of us leave our goals in a very unspecific state – at which point they’re more dreams than goals. Make them specific. Kobliner’s recommendation is to assign them numbers – what will they really cost? Once you have those numbers, they move from being dreams to being savings targets.

Next, figure out where your money is going. Keep track of your spending for at least a month (two or three is better) and figure out how much you’re really spending each month. The big focus is figuring out how much you really spend in an unnecessary fashion and cutting it (not eliminating it). You want to leave the non-essential spending that’s really valuable to you and get rid of the ho-hum stuff, directing that cash towards your goals.

Dealing with Debt
Kobliner outlines some of the issues of dealing with debt, but doesn’t really get into a debt repayment plan, probably under the assumption that readers won’t be in too much debt. I’m not sure if I agree with that, but most of the other advice is useful, particularly the details on student loans.

Kobliner does devote several pages to car leases, which is pretty interesting. Car leases are mostly there for people who are willing to pay to essentially rent a new car. The only problem with that is if you compare the costs of that to driving a car up to a healthy mileage (say, 150,000 miles), leases almost always lose out. The cost of actually buying a car may be more, but the many years you can go without a car payment if you drive a car to the problematic stage more than make up for it. If you’re addicted to a shiny new car and have a trust fund, a lease might be a good choice – otherwise, it’s probably not worth the effort.

Basic Banking
The big message here is that it’s well worth your time to shop around for a bank that treats you well. A good bank should have no fees – no maintenance fees, a huge ATM network without fees, no fees for online banking, or anything else – and great customer service. The time investment you put into finding a bank with these attributes will be recouped over the long run.

So how do you find such a bank? Start Googling for bank recommendations. Use Bankrate.com. Ask people you know and trust what banks they use and whether they like them. I use ING Direct for everything and I’m quite happy with them.

All You Really Need to Know About Investing
What do you do when your debt is under control and you’re bringing in a surplus? First step: build up a cash emergency fund equal to a bare minimum of three months’ worth of living expenses, and keep it in a high-interest savings account or a money market account. Second step: begin investing in stocks and bonds.

Kobliner points towards using mutual funds to balance out your risks. That’s fine, but if you’re doing that, seek out index funds – they’re extremely low cost and provide tons of diversification.

The Brave New World of 401(k)s
What about saving for retirement? The big key is to get started now – don’t put it off. The money you put away now is much more valuable than the money you might put away later because you have more years for the power of compound interest to work for you. A stock bought today has more years to pay you dividends than a stock bought in ten years.

Kobliner strongly encourages people to sign up for a 401(k)/403(b) at their place of employment and get any matching funds that their employer provides. Doing that today means you not only get the advantage of compound interest, but you also get 50% or 100% more for free right off the bat, regardless of what the market does.

Once you’re past the level of matching and still want to save more, Kobliner points towards opening a Roth IRA. Beyond that, she offers a long list of additional things you can do if you want to save more.

Oh, Give Me a Home
Rent or buy? It’s a question that many potential homeowners ask themselves (in fact, I’ve finally come to my own conclusion on this … but that can wait for another day). Kobliner suggests some simple rules: if you can’t envision yourself in the same place in several years, rent. If you don’t have a steady income, rent. Don’t assume you get a tax break from buying (the standard deduction can often be more).

If you do decide to buy, you’re again better off waiting. Get a healthy down payment in the bank – 20%, at least. Get your credit into thorough shape. Have a steady, stable job and a tax return that demonstrates this solid income.

Insurance: What You Need and What You Don’t
On the insurance issue, Get a Financial Life covers the basics: life insurance, disability insurance, health insurance, homeowners and renters insurance, and auto insurance. In each case, shop around and investigate all of your options.

Kobliner’s style is to explain all of the options available in a readable style and more or less allow the reader to draw their own conclusions. While this is really helpful, many people often turn to such books to largely be told what to do. The answer isn’t always cut and dried, so Kobliner takes the analytical route – if you spell out clearly the pros and cons of a lot of options, a thoughtful person will clearly be pointed to the right answer for them. That’s why I think Get a Financial Life is a great option for a young, analytical, and thoughtful person – it doesn’t just cram a conclusion down your throat, but explains options in a clear and reasonable way.

How to Make Your Life Less Taxing
The book wraps up (aside from some appendices) with discussions on how to minimize taxes. She offers up a huge list of ways to trim your tax burden via tax writeoffs and deductions.

Surprisingly, Kobliner doesn’t really discuss tax preparation software. We’ve used TurboTax to prepare ours for years and it’s been quite worthwhile, especially with the challenges of filing if you’re self-employed.

Is Get a Financial Life Worth Reading?
Get a Financial Life is short on motivation and long on facts. That makes it the perfect book for some (simply because it stacks so much information together in one place) and useless for others. Unfortunately, it also means that it covers a lot of the same ground as other personal finance books – there’s more detail, but there’s less motivation.

Get a Financial Life works for someone who already is heading in a stable financial direction and has an analytical mind that thrives on facts. Kobliner does a great job of breaking down the pile of information out there.

Get a Financial Life won’t change your life, but it can provide all the meat you need to head in the right direction. For some, that’s perfect. It’s a well-written example of an information-heavy personal finance book.

In the long term, though, it’s a different story. It causes weight gain and other health problems. It can cause a negative body image and make people feel worse about themselves. Those effects cause an overall negative emotional sense, so they turn to the things that comfort them.

Many things in modern life follow that same structure: they’re nice in the short term, but incredibly painful in the long term. Credit card debt – you get what you want in the short term, but you wind up paying a ton of debt over the long term. Diapers – we use the convenient disposables for now, but later we lament filling up landfills with things that will take many, many years to biodegrade. A home mortgage – you get to move into a home, but you make huge interest payments for many years.

Again and again, humans choose to value the short term over the long term. We do it with countless daily actions each day, from the food we eat to the activities we choose to fill our time with. Our focus is on the now, not on the five years from now.

This is natural, though. Throughout the course of human history, humans have spent most of their time living a true hand-to-mouth existence. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors constantly benefitted by keeping their eyes on the immediate prize – the food in their stomach today and this winter, nothing else. Agriculture took many, many millennia to take off, and it’s easy to see why – you have to see some real success at agriculture to see it beating the benefits of picking a bunch of wild berries.

Today, though, we live in a different world. Food will be available tomorrow, but many of us still behave as though it might not be. There are thousands of apartments and rentals in most areas, but we buy a home because it fits our needs better – but our biggest “need” is simply a false sense of stability.

I do this myself all the time.

My focus is always on the short term with The Simple Dollar. I obsess mostly over the posts for the next week or so, without often worrying about anything beyond that. On the occasions when I do focus on the long term (like writing books, writing and preparing downloadables, working on projects with other bloggers, and so on), I usually find that over a longer period, I’m glad I did it.

I often try to put off meals that take a long time to prepare because, in the short term, I don’t want to make that time investment. Over the long haul, though, the great meals I enjoy and remember are often the ones I spend a long time on – the pasta made from scratch, the coq au vin cooked slowly and carefully, and so on.

Some days, I do not want to go exercise at all. It seems like a short term gain to just relax and kick back. I could read a book, after all, instead of going out there, getting out of breath, getting all sweaty, and having my legs feel like lead. If I don’t do it regularly, though, my daily life goes down in quality. I have less energy. I have less motivation to do … well, anything. I gain weight and my body image goes downhill, as does my appearance to others.

Sometimes I’m tempted to go the easy route when with my kids. Why don’t we just play in the backyard instead of loading up and going to a state park? It’s rainy – let’s just watch a movie instead of getting out all of the art supplies. In five years, though, what will have built a stronger bond with my kids? Time spent doing something adventurous and creative with their father, or time spent sitting on the couch or playing on the backyard slide?

In each case, the simple choice in the short term is far from the most enjoyable choice in the long term. However, the pain in the long term from the “easy” choice is far, far worse than the short term disadvantage.

Here’s an interesting exercise to highlight how much the phenomenon impacts your life. Spend a day thinking about what this activity will be worth to you in five years. If you eat that junk food, will the impact on you be positive or negative five years down the road? What about if you eat spinach instead? What will be the impact on you if you buy that DVD five years down the road? What if you put that cash towards your debt instead?

You make the little choices every single day to build your future. The better your choices, the better your life will be.

So, today, eat a little broccoli and save a few pennies. Over the long term, big dividends will be paid out.

I agree strongly with Anderson, actually, It’s hard to beat “free” in the eyes of a consumer. My free “Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance On Just One Page” has been downloaded roughly 35,000 times, while my $2 “31 Days to Fix Your Finances” document has been downloaded about 2% as often (and has been available for longer). The difference? Free versus $2.

Many people seem to view free things as a tremendous bargain. There are countless “freebie” websites out there that will gladly point you in the direction of free things – product samples and the like. Visiting a grocery store on a Saturday afternoon will often load you up on free samples, especially if you go to a warehouse club like Costco or Sam’s Club. There’s mountains of free content online – you don’t have to pay a dime to read The Simple Dollar or virtually any other blog, and most media sources have large websites with lots of free content.

I don’t view them as a bargain at all. Instead, it’s just another type of value exchange – the consumer pays a cost, but not directly out of their wallet.

Take the free grocery store samples, for example. These samples are given away as an enticement to get you to buy something impulsively. The items that are sampled often have a nice fat profit margin for the store, so not only are you buying something you didn’t want, you’re overpaying for the item, too. “Well, I’m not going to buy it…” If that’s true, it’s not in the economic best interest of the store to give away the sample. Samples are free, but they result in elevated prices and impulse buys for you.

What about product freebies? Fill out a form and get free stuff in the mail, right? Sure, you can get a four pound bag of dog food for free, but then you’ll find yourself with a mailbox full of advertisements for the product, coupons for the product, constant visual reminders to buy the product. You might get a free item to use, but you give away some of your mindspace to a product that you’re interested in enough to actually go get the freebie. Companies that do this do it because they have a huge advertising budget, and that huge advertising budget comes from the difference between the value of the product and the price you pay.

What about the dentist? The dentist gives me a free toothbrush every time I visit, right? How can that be bad? The reason a business gives away a freebie is to get repeat business, and their margins are fat enough that they can advertise by giving away their product. Your dentist gives you a toothbrush because it’s a reminder of the dental visit and it subtly encourages you to go back. The toothbrush manufacturers give (or sell at extremely low cost) toothbrushes to dentists because it gets that brand’s foothold in your house. Again, you pay the cost by becoming accustomed to a particular product.

This blog is yet another example. I write these articles and give them to you to read for no financial cost. However, the site is supported by advertisements. Advertisers pay me to place ads on the site in the belief that you’ll either click through to investigate the product or the name/image of the product will stick in your mind. Without their support, The Simple Dollar couldn’t run. In effect, you “pay” the cost by seeing those little ads on the site. It’s very similar to why some magazine subscriptions are lower than the cost of shipping them to you, like a subscription to Entertainment Weekly or Real Simple for $5.

Freebies aren’t a bad thing. We have a free calendar on our wall and mostly use free pens from hotels. Freebies can provide enough usefulness to overcome their drawbacks for you (for example, hundreds of thousands of Simple Dollar readers must feel this way).

But it’s important to recognize that a free item isn’t free. You’re always exchanging something for it – ads in your visual area (like those on freebie pens), product familiarity, or inflated prices.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Unsurprisingly, this means that I also read quite a bit about food as well. I read several food magazines and visit quite a few food blogs on a regular basis.

Recently, I read an article on Michael Ruhlman’s blog about his negative impressions of the Cheesecake Factory. This was followed by tons of comments from people who found the food at the Cheesecake Factory to be wholly unacceptable for their standards. One even went so far as to essentially question the sanity of their own mother for enjoying regular dinner dates with their friends there.

An aside: I admit I’m happiest cooking food in my own home. When I eat outside the home, the experience, to me, is a combination of food and people, leaning towards the “people” side of the equation. When I eat outside the home, rarely do I remember the food – I remember the dinner conversation. I’ve eaten at a Cheesecake Factory twice – I don’t remember what I ate one of the visits, and I only remember my dish at the other visit (fish tacos) because it became something of a conversation subject. While I don’t remember a great meal from the Cheesecake Factory, nor do I remember anything exceptionally poor, as opposed to plenty other particular restaurants and bistros that shall remain nameless.

This made me start to think about why people would innately criticize a perfectly good meal. What exactly would cause a perfectly good restaurant like the Cheesecake Factory to get such a bad rap in those circles?

What I realized is that the problem has to do with internal scales of quality.

I’m happy eating what I prepare at home. Most of the time, I’d judge those meals as being around a 6 on my scale of good meals – perfectly good. On occasion, I’ll reach an 8 or so.

What’s the 10 on that scale? There are a few meals that my mother prepares that are up there on my scale, but they’re helped by the “comfort food” factor. Aside from that, my definition of a 10 comes from eating at Aunt Maude’s, a wonderful restaurant in Ames, Iowa that I highly recommend to anyone who visits there. The atmosphere is nice without being pretentious and the food is excellent.

Someday, I fully intend to dine at a restaurant that’s off the high end of my scale. I’d love to enjoy a meal at one of the S. Pellegrino 50 at some point.

However, I have no interest in going to those restaurants more than once or twice in my life.

Why is that? It’s pretty simple. If I dine at an incredibly high end restaurant once in my life, it’s a truly unique occasion – one that I don’t even use in my personal idea of what’s good and what’s bad. I could dine at Per Se once, be utterly blown away, but that one experience wouldn’t change the fact that I still view dinner prepared in my own kitchen as a “6.”

But what happens if I go there twice? And I dine at a few other restaurants on that list? I go to one every few months – and that standard starts to enter my scale. Suddenly, the meal in my own kitchen goes down to a “2″ – I’m no longer nearly as happy with it.

Instead, my idea of a great meal is boxed in at the $250 a plate price at Per Se. Everything else is judged by that level of quality – and, unsurprisingly, everything else falls short.

If I reached a point where I judged all my meals by restaurants on the S. Pellegrino 50 list, I’m going to be unhappy with almost every dining experience and I’ll go broke chasing a “decent” dining experience.

The high end experience, taken once, is something to always remember. It’s a life-affirming experience, something to enjoy and cherish.

The high end experience, taken on a regular basis, drives you to disaster. It undermines your enjoyment of the simpler experiences in life.

When you reach the point that dinner with your mother at the Cheesecake Factory on the occasion of her birthday at her request becomes intolerable because of the quality of the food, you’re riding a very dangerous line. You either need to have an enormous bankroll devoted to chasing exquisite dining experiences or bankruptcy will be finding you soon.

Peak experiences are great things. They’re things to enjoy and truly savor in life and if you can truly afford it, go for it. But they have a dangerous side as well. When those peak experiences become your new standard, you begin to ride a very expensive track. Not only that, the peak experiences are no longer peaks – a dinner at Per Se no longer takes you to another world. It becomes ordinary, and some of the value is lost.

This philosophy holds true for any experience in life. Vacations – a European trip once a decade or so can be a true peak experience, but one taken every year starts to become the standard, and an expensive one. Even things as simple as coffee: if you enjoy an expensive cup at a high end coffee shop every day, suddenly that’s your standard, you’re burning through piles of cash, and ordinary coffee is no longer good enough.

When a peak experience becomes an ordinary experience, you not only lose money, you lose happiness, too.

For a long time, I was one of the resentful folks. I had a hard time speaking up in group situations and I hated presenting. The first time I had to give a major presentation to a group and interact with them, I went to the bathroom repeatedly and threw up until I was dry heaving because I was so nervous and so unconfident.

What I’ve learned over time is that the person that appears confident is often not as confident as they appear. They just simply do a few things well. They walk in a way that appears confident. Their eyes seem alert. They stand tall. They have a faint appeal that you can’t quite put your finger on. You feel fine talking to them, but not to most people.

They’re not wired differently than you. They just do a few clever things.

Over time, I’ve figured out how to make many of those things quite natural for me – and most of the techniques I use are somewhat unusual. Here are ten of them. Each of them will help if you have problems with appearing confident, as I sometimes do.

1. Pick a spot.
When you first walk into a room, look around with your head completely level. Find a spot in the room that’s exactly at your eye level. It can be something on the wall, an object hanging from the ceiling, or something else. Pick something you’ll find visually interesting, if you can find anything. Once you’ve found your spot, remember it. Then, whenever you’re nervous, sweep your eyes to that spot.

What this does is it allows you to keep your nervous tic of staring at the floor or looking away from someone – something that can be very hard for an introvert to break – and redirect it in a bit of an optical illusion. By keeping your eyes up at eye level – which they will be if you look at that object – you appear to be looking at another person. That is a subtle cue of confidence – you’re looking for others, thus you must be socially accepted.

Obviously, you shouldn’t stare at the object, but knowing it’s there and looking at it from time to time when you’re nervous is a vast improvement over casting your eyes down, which signals a complete lack of confidence.

2. Improve your posture with duct tape.
Yes, duct tape. Masking tape or electrical tape or even Scotch tape will work, too. You’ll need a friend or a spouse with this.

Stand up as straight as you can, with your back vertical and your arms at your sides, relaxed. Then, have a friend take a strip of duct tape and run a three inch strip down your back. The top of it should be on the center of one of your shoulder blades and end three inches below it. Then, that person should put a second strip, starting at the center of your other shoulder blade and going straight down for three inches. Take a third strip and apply it horizontally, connecting the tops of the strips, then a fourth strip connecting the bottoms of the vertical strips. You should have a rectangle on your back, nearly square in shape.

Here’s the thing. As you go through your day, every time you attempt to slouch, that tape will tug at your skin, resisting a poor change in posture. It’s not painful (unless you have excessive hair back there), but it is enough of a physical reminder to cause you to naturally keep a good posture.

This works great before a big meeting, but it also works great for training by doing it every day for a few weeks. You’ll naturally exercise some muscles in your back, making them stronger, and allow other muscles to relax and slightly weaken. What will happen is that your muscles will begin to find that a position of good posture is the natural one and that’s how you’ll begin to sit and stand.

Good posture gives the appearance of confidence, and this is a great little way to create that appearance.

3. Carry a flask – whether you drink or not.
I was at a conference chatting with a really solid presenter from Oracle whose name I can’t recall right now – let’s call him “Jim.” After a really great presentation, I started chatting with Jim and discovered that we knew a few people in common, so after the chat, we agreed to go get a drink together.

On the way, we both needed to stop to use the restroom. When I was finished, I walked out to see Jim taking a big slug out of a flask he had pulled out of his front pocket. I jokingly said, “Whoa, cowboy! Getting an early start?” He smiled, swished the liquid around in his mouth for a minute, then spit out some blue stuff. He grinned and said, “Listerine.”

It was a trick of his. Whenever he was about to meet with some people, he’d head to the bathroom, take a slug out of his flask, swish it around for a bit, then spit it out. He’d follow it with a bit of water to get any bad taste out, then look in the mirror to make sure there wasn’t any food in his teeth.

Doing that simple routine made him feel better. He could be sure his breath didn’t smell at all, his mouth felt squeaky clean, and he was also confident there was no food on his face or in his teeth. All around, it really gave his confidence a bump.

Good advice. I actually started just keeping a travel bottle of Listerine with me, but this is a great use for a flask since they’re designed to fit well in a pocket.

4. Go for a thirty minute fast walk three times a week.
Walking improves your health. We all know it – and it’s absolutely true. Thirty minutes walking instead of watching a television show will help you lose weight, feel better, and all that.

But it has an extra confidence booster in it as well.

If you make an effort to walk as fast as you can on your walks, the speed of your natural, normal walk will increase, too. It’ll feel more natural for you to go faster, so you will. You’ll strengthen all the appropriate muscles and, soon, the way you walk across a room will look much more confident than before without any conscious effort on your part.

5. Memorize a person’s eye color with one extra adjective.
I have a hard time looking people in the eye. Mostly, it’s because my eyes sometimes have problems focusing well, especially in the evening, but there’s also an aspect of low confidence there, too.

I’ve found a solution that works well in both regards. It gives me a reason to look people in the eye on a regular basis (making me appear confident) but not too much (making me appear creepy).

All I do is this. When I first meet a person, I look into their eyes until I can describe their eye color with one noun and at least one descriptive adjective. Their eyes are “cloudy blue.” Their eyes are “mocha brown.” Once I’ve figured it out, I’m free to look away.

Then, if I can’t recall immediately their eye color, I know I should look back. In practice, this means that I tend to look at their eyes directly several times early on in our conversation, but not too much at one shot. Instead, I alternate it with the first trick, swiveling my eyes to an object at eye level in the room.

What does this do? It creates an impression that I’m interested in what they’re saying and also fully engaged in the larger event – very confident – when in truth I’m not confident at all.

6. Keep a chamomile tea bag in your wallet.
Chamomile tea is an effective natural relaxant. It is the single best natural way I’ve found to calm myself down in any situation that makes me nervous. If I feel awkward, I’ll just find some hot water, put it in a cup, dunk in a bag of chamomile tea, let it steep for a couple minutes, then drink it down. Calmness washes over me.

It really helps with appearing confident, too. I tend to get quite nervous during social events – and it shows. I talk too fast, look away, and generally hide from conversation. In short, I need to calm down. When I’m calm, my speech gets a bit slower, I’m less nervous around other people, and I’m more willing to engage others – all signs of confidence.

Chamomile is a natural calming agent that’s pretty much socially acceptable in any situation, so it’s a great “secret weapon” to have in your pocket.

7. “Hi, I’m Trent Hamm.” Period.
Whenever I would introduce myself to people, I often found myself saying things like, “Hi, I’m Trent Hamm and I work on this project and I wrote this document” or something to that effect. In my nervousness, I felt the need to include what amounted to a short resume with my name.

I believed at the time that it would do a good job of laying out who I was to people, but what it actually does is shows that you’re not confident already in who you are. If the other person doesn’t know who you are, they’ll either ask for information – or they’ll hold it in and believe they should know who you are. In either case, you seem more intriguing and in control.

So, next time you introduce yourself, stop with your name. At the very least, it opens the door to more conversation.

8. Hit Google News.
Whenever I enter a group, I usually stop and check the news to see if any major events have occurred really recently. This gives me something to break the ice with almost every time – I can simply use a major news event or a popular culture event to open with.

I usually read the top stories and see if there’s anything of strong general interest there. If it’s a slow news day, I’ll check the entertainment and sports news. In some groups, I’ll check other news sections, too – technology works well in some groups, and business and money news works well in other groups. If I see something interesting but I don’t understand a big piece of it, I take another few seconds and hit Wikipedia to give myself enough context that I’m not clueless.

Having a current event or two in my head gives me something to say when I’m standing there wondering what on earth I should be talking about. Quite often, the person who comes up with conversation topics is often the person who comes off as confident, as many other people are often standing around just as nervously.

9. Take five deep breaths.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed with a situation or you’re about to step out into a room where you have to start speaking very quickly, just pause for a moment and take five deep breaths.

The intake of a lot of oxygen does several little things to your biochemistry, all of which are helpful. It lowers blood pressure. It increases alertness. It reduces anxiety. In short, it’s a very simple thing that helps in almost any situation that makes you nervous.

I find that any time I know I’m going to be speaking soon, I do this. It always helps, without fail – I feel better right after doing it.

10. When in doubt, ask a question.
So, your breath smells good. Your posture is good. You naturally walk with confidence and introduce yourself with confidence. You do a bit of small talk with current events. Then….

The best thing you can possibly do is lead the conversation. The best way to do that is to simply ask a question and then listen to the response. Ask them what they do. Ask them about their biggest project. Ask them what they think of the meeting, or of the last speaker. Ask them what hotel they’re staying at and if they like it.

Then, listen to what they say. Almost always, you can follow up on something there. You can relate your own experience or thoughts. You can ask another question. You can dig into information that you actually want to know more about.

Line this up with the other techniques (the eye technique and good posture) and you’ll look confident no matter how you feel inside.

Good luck.